Lilijoy half-stood on the cavern floor, hands on trembling knees, the flaming remains of her somewhat improvised flying device scattered behind her, stomach queasy and senses scrambled. Her pulse pounded in her ears, sending dark waves of distortion across her vision. She caught her breath after a minute or so, pried her cold sweaty hands off her legs and raised them into the air.

“That was awesome!” she yelled at the ceiling.

She had gained a much better understanding of the term ‘death spiral’ during her first attempt at flight but had somehow managed to come down just at the edge of the lava lake, before hot-footing it to a small hill that wasn’t quite hot enough to raise blisters on her exposed skin. As the adrenaline slowly ebbed, she sat uncomfortably on her walking stone and appraised her abused soles. Charred callus, blisters, cuts and scrapes greeted her inspection, and she tsked once before putting her foot down. Nothing to be done about it now.

She looked out over the expanse of previously melted rock, trying to connect it to her previous view from above. It was surprisingly difficult. From above, it looked like she could walk toward the far end of the cavern, avoiding obvious obstacles like half-melted stalagmite fields, small lava pools and the fields of sharp boulders. Down here, even tiny rocks had cutting points and edges , other than the occasional smooth and blobby stretch .

“Who came up with these names anyway?” she asked.

“Huh.” What kind of nightmarish place did Hawaiians live, to go to the bother of making up words for different textures of lava? She wondered what had become of it, but thankfully not strongly enough to prompt more answers from her system.

She ventured off her slightly cooler hill, only to retreat immediately. The ground was simply too hot. She thought about taking off her shirt and wrapping her feet with it but the thought of falling bare skinned onto the vicious ‘a’a’ gave her pause. Her shirt was made of some rough fabric and was very sturdy, though without sleeves. It had protected her well against small cuts and scrapes so far, and she hated to destroy it unless she had no other choice.

She leaned on her walking stone and looked out at the ground. Her echolocation didn’t seem to be much help; she could identify particularly hot areas from the rising air currents above them, but smaller variations in ground temperature got lost in the mix. Still, it seemed her best strategy was to identify the truly dangerous areas and work from there.

As she began her index of ‘places to fry her feet on’, she began to notice that they glowed a deep red color, compared to the rest of the ground.

‘Did they do that before?’ she asked herself. She couldn’t remember seeing the shades of reds that now began to cover the entire cavern in her vision, trending orange now for the hottest and almost black for the coolest.

“No, this is new...” she whispered. Was she seeing temperature now? The specificity of her infrared vision continued to improve over the next minute, and soon she could tell where it was cool enough to walk just by looking.

Overwhelmed by one new sensory ability after another, Lilijoy was less excited about all the pretty new colors arranging themselves in front of her than about the fact that she might be able to get to the other side of the lava field with both her shirt and her feet intact. She found a path that was largely dark in her new vision and began to hobble along.

This is almost as bad as the Piles, she thought. Bad smell, painful shards of rock...why, they could be long lost brothers.

She began giggling softly, wondering somewhere in the back of her mind whether the fumes were making her so light-headed and floaty feeling.

“Whee!” she squealed as she jumped over a glowing hot spot. The smooth lava on the other side of her jump gave way suddenly, only a thin crust over an air pocket about a foot deep. The edges of the lava slashed her ankle, but she didn’t mind too much.

“Oh! Hey there. Who are you?” she said to the small black snake who stuck his head out from behind a rock. “You have friends!” she announced, as several more heads popped out of nearby nooks and crannies. “You have lots of fr….” her voice tailed off as dozens and dozens of the creatures began to emerge.

A bold one scampered onto a pile of larger lava rocks, revealing three sets of little legs along its long sinuous body. It wove its utterly black torso gracefully back and forth between the sharp boulders in short bursts, somehow able to transition between lightning speed and utter stillness with no intervening state. When it reached the top of the stack it looked at Lilijoy and gave a quick hiss of warning to her. She felt movement in her three-sixty sense, and when she turned her head, she was surrounded by a small army of black six-legged serpents.

was all her system showed her about them.

She eased herself forward to avoid startling them, and they adapted to her new location instantly, maintaining a perimeter of about six feet. More hissing ensued. She clicked her tongue gently to keep an overview of the situation; they didn’t have any body heat, so they were difficult to track with her eyes. From the overview level, the circle of lizards with her at the center almost looked like a big round eye, and she began to play with them, moving forward, then backwards, scrolling the lizards along the terrain wherever she went.

She didn’t feel any particular danger from them; more a hostile curiosity. Their teeth were small, though clearly sharp when she zoomed in to see better, but she doubted they could do too much damage to her without suffering many losses. After all, they were probably about half as long as she was tall, at least most of them.

After a few minutes of this, the lead lizard (or at least she thought it was the same one), gave several short sharp hisses, and the pack vanished in an instant.

I guess they got bored, she thought, just as something big and fast entered her awareness, coming up on her from behind. With only a split second to react, she crouched too late, and was violently half-spun into the ground. A large black tail streamed past her, bits of broken lava scattering in all directions. Even as the tail passed, the head was back for another try, as the much larger six legged lizard doubled back on itself. Lilijoy swiped at it weakly with her walking stone, luckily catching it in the teeth.

The blow knocked its head off course just enough to spare her throat, but it still got a hold on her left shoulder and began to thrash her back and forth wildly, teeth digging in to her small muscles. She clubbed at it as best she could while being whipped back and forth, with absolutely no force of any kind behind her blows. She might as well have been petting it. While the front of the long lizard was occupying her attention admirably, the other sets of legs circled its body around to enclose her, pinning her arms at her sides.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

With its victim secured, it let go and pulled back its head, cold black eyes slitted nearly shut for protection.

Perhaps it is going to talk to me?

"Hi, Mister Lizard...” she started to say, but was cut off as the lizard whipped its head forward and tore out her throat. Her last view was of dozens of smaller lizards emerging from crevices and cracks, coming to join for leftovers.

***

As her consciousness faded, a sensation of being sucked up through an enormous, though not particularly wide straw followed. After a brief period of disembodied blackness, she felt the process reverse, the particles of ‘her’ shot down in a thin stretched stream and, as she hit, caught up to one another into a clump she eventually recognized as her body. She felt very weak, and not entirely present in her flesh as she fumbled around in her head trying to figure out where her senses had gone. Eventually, she was able to round them up and straighten them out.

She was still in the cavern, that much was obvious as soon as she could feel the boiling hot rock under her back. Wait, no, that was her chest. Either way, she felt an urgent need to not be lying down on a bed of piercing crumbled lava fragments that were slowly cooking her through her tunic. Groaning, though softly to avoid any more lizard encounters, she struggled to her feet and noticed with relief that dying instantly healed all her injuries. She couldn’t see or hear any signs of a feeding frenzy nearby, so she figured that either time had passed while she in limbo, or she was too far away to sense the activity.

A horrible thought occurred to her. What if her body disappeared when she died? That would be so unfair to the lizards.

Also, they would still be hungry, which was not exactly good for her either.

She spent a moment kicking herself for her carelessness. What was she thinking, jumping merrily through a hostile, dangerous landscape? She wanted to blame the fumes, but she knew that she was also just careless, just as she had been when she stayed out too late collecting cattails. That past carelessness had nearly killed her, and this recent bout had actually killed her, though she definitely preferred the kind of dying where you can still be alive later. She resolved to be more cautious for the rest of the trials (however long that was) and to make better use of her amazing new senses.

She turned her infrared vision to her general area to find a safe way forward. Then she realized that she had no idea what forward was anymore. Looking around, she found a large source of heat rising through the air and assumed that was the lava lake. Her original goal was to cross the cavern as directly as she could. There were some interesting rock formations on the far side that she could make out when her vantage point was better, and they had become her target. Hoping that her best bet was to continue moving away from the lava lake, she set off, moving as stealthily as she could.

As it turned out, walking on fragile shards of broken lava formations is not a particularly good formula for silent movement. First, she tried moving slowly, carefully setting her foot down in a way that moved the crunchiest bits to the side. This was quite successful, but she estimated it would take her about an hour to travel a couple hundred feet. Plus, her thighs began to burn from constantly holding her feet up. Abandoning that idea, her next strategy was to find a smoother surface that could take her in the right direction. She used sporadic tongue clicks to find a few particularly reflective areas on the ground, slow walked through the crunchy stuff until she arrived, and was then able to move at a good pace until the next crunchy part. Every couple of minutes she would freeze and silently scan her surroundings for signs of life, particularly the six-legged reptilian kind. In this way, she was able to cross about halfway without being eaten.

The ground became cooler as she progressed, though it was a relative coolness, more discomfort, less agony. Several times she saw larger lizards lying torpid on rocks, basking in the heat. This must be a prime area for napping, she thought; just the right temperature if you happened to be a giant six-legged lizard.

It wasn’t until she was well past the halfway point (at least she hoped it was) that the cavern created a problem for her.

Two lizards to the right of her general direction started up a disagreement of some kind. Perhaps they wanted the same basking spot? Whatever the reason, there was now a commotion not that far from where she crouched. The two lizards’ large writhing bodies were throwing and crushing lava stones all over the place. This, combined with the loud hissing noises they were exchanging as they tangled, created an explosive crashing tumult that was probably audible across the cavern. The abundance of sound confused her echolocation greatly.

While it was tempting to abandon stealth and sprint out of the area in the hope that the battle would distract other predators, Lilijoy couldn’t shake images of her recent violent death from her thoughts. What if she ran, and the two lizards decided to put aside their differences to share a snack? Not only that, she noticed lithe forms moving through the shadows and rocks of the cavern floor, converging on the general area of the fight as covert spectators. Some were almost as large as the two combatants, and she truly wished to avoid their tender affections.

As she crouched in indecision, she felt a sharp pain on the big toe of her left foot. Suppressing a yelp into a sharp hiss of her own, she looked down to see her latest problem.

Attempting to grapple and encircle her toe while holding it with its teeth was a mighty foe about a foot long. The tiny six-legged lizard would have been cute if it weren’t for the half-moon of her blood she could see welling forth around its muzzle. She reached down and pinched it on the neck, hoping to convince it to release its bite, but it held on with all its might, even twisting its little body to coil around and grab her wrist with its body and rear legs.

“You know this can’t end well, don’t you?” she whispered to it.

It eyed her and doubled down on its thrashing bite attack.

“Fierce little thing you are. Not too bright though.” She eased herself carefully into a sitting position and considered her new accessory. Its long agile form recalled her flower-vines.

Even later, when she had a chance to think through her actions at that moment, she wasn’t sure why she did it. She found the empty space before action, softened the barriers of her mind’s body concept, and reached to the small being that was now not distinct from her, but blurred and overlapping. It was her sixth finger again, and she was biting her own toe because she needed to, but she didn’t need to anymore. It was obvious, inevitable that her jaws release, relax into inaction and be still...

A second later, the spell broke, the little lizardling writhed from her grasp and disappeared into a crack in the floor without a sound.

Lilijoy remained still. Somewhere in the background, two titans flailed against each other, crushing and grinding the rocks beneath them, but she didn’t notice. It was as if her shared moment with the lizard, her intense desire for release and inaction had possessed her even more that the small being. She breathed as rocks scattered and massive bodies writhed. She observed as hissing and crashing caused waves of static to cross her sonic vision. There was no need to move, only peace in being...

Until a huge mass of writhing vines came crashing down to the cavern floor on top of the two combatants, pulverizing stone and flesh, grasping, grabbing, tearing and crushing. A cloud of dust and pebbles ejected from the impact blew out on all sides, washing over Lilijoy and the rest of the skulking audience. The lizards fled, vanishing in the time it took for the first rocks to hit the floor, leaving Lilijoy to watch as the vines, or whatever they were, slowly returned up to the distant ceiling, holding two dripping clumps of meat.

She almost didn’t want to, but Lilijoy trained her senses up to the origin of the ‘vines’ and could barely make out a huge irregular body up among the stalactites. She saw fluid running down the vines, fluid dripping from an enormous orifice that was slowly opening in the body almost directly above her as it pulled its meal up to digest.

Huh, she thought. I was not expecting that.